There’s a lot of free software out there, and of course that include games! Although free games are not hard to find (Google!) – finding quality games is another story. Some might be lucky enough to know someone with insight, others have to try out a couple of games before finding a good one. I’m going to give you a few right here, right now. You could check out a previous post about this.

Strategy/Simulation: OpenTTD (Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe).

TTD was one of my favorite games for Windows 98 and I became frustrated when it refused to work under Windows XP. It’s based on/inspired by TTD but it doesn’t contain any material from the original game. If you want you can import the old graphics (requires the original game).

In OpenTTD you build vehicles and transport goods. It’s simple to learn but hard to master. In order to build the best and most efficient enterprise, you need to carefully plan where to build stations and what vehicles to invest in. When dealing with trains you have the ability to run multiple trains on the same track, but this does of course require some skill to pull off.

Be prepared for a steep learning curve. Once you get how it works, you’ll love it! OpenTTD is a great game indeed.

Strategy/Action: League of Legends

I’ve mentioned this game before, but it deserves to be mentioned again! League of Legends – or simply LoL – is a DotA-clone.

Be prepared for a fast-paced third-person real time strategy game! You are one of five on your team, fighting an equal number of opponents. You select your champion and purchase what items you see fit (known as “builds”). Each champion has four unique abilities (plus one passive) such as leaping, stunning or absorbing damage.

The Europe realm has a number of issues (so does the US, but not as many). LoL will sometimes force you to play on US servers, giving you a ping at 100-150. They fund the game selling in-game skins and heroes (heroes can be unlocked by playing as well), so make sure you like what they are doing before you support them. It’s not unusual for EU to experience a total shutdown or login queues at an hour or two.

Strategy/Tower Defense: Bloons Tower Defense and Vector TD

Flash-based strategy games never fail! Bloons TD and Vector TD are two great tower defense games. Each one will easily provide two hours of playtime if you like the genre.

Tower Defense is a game genre where you build offensive structures (towers) to eliminate enemies from reaching the end of a map. Sometimes you need to do quite a bit of serious planning to win, but it’s a very casual genre. If you need more action you should totally check out (although not free) Sanctum!

Strategy/Action: Blood Line Champions

Now this is a game I’m not really into, however it’s worth mentioning. It’s said to be a lot like the World Of Warcraft Arena. Focus is placed entirely on your combat skills. There are no critical strikes (which is random and not skill) or such.

Make sure to run the tutorial and practice against bots before playing against other living beings. Another steep learning curve indeed!

BLC works just like LoL in many ways, you have a couple of “free to play” champions and additional champions can be unlocked by either paying or playing. Special non-essential stuff can be bought from an in-game shop which supports the developers.

If you happen to try it out, make sure to drop a comment :).

More?

I’ve written a list of all the game I’ve ever played (I update it from time to time). Some games there are free, others are not.

If you know any other free games, please drop a comment! (Trials for i.e. WoW doesn’t count as free).

Freedom of speech is great – but don’t bite the hand that feeds you! I can speak freely now when I’m rid of One.com and it’s bad hosting, though. I’m going to try to highlight the positive as well as negative sides of One.com (but mostly negative, since One.com is crap). Today I’m using Swedish host Binero and I’m happy with the result.

Reasons why not to use One.com

One.com Downtime

One.com was my first web host, so they set the standard for what I thought was acceptable. Downtime two times a week is unacceptable, but how would I know? I’ve had two sites hosted at One.com and both had issues with downtime. Problem is – One.com won’t tell you when they shut your site down for an hour or two. You will, however, receive a notice if there is maintenance about to happen (which could take 5-8 hours to complete).

When this site was hosted at One.com it had to go through five maintenances and I found about ten unreported major downtimes. Moreover I can’t remember how many minute-long downtimes I found. Estimated uptime at One.com? 90%? It’s hard to estimate since errors are not reported, and 1-2 hour downtimes are hard to find if I’m not online. Do not use One.com if you need your material on the web at all times.

One.com Stability and Speed

A web host must ensure stability and speed since it’s the reason why we hire them instead of hosting the site ourselves. This goes hand in hand with downtime since a site cannot both be stable and have downtime. According to Google Webmaster Tools my site was slower than 90% of the web. 90%?!?! On top of that One.com threw more Server Internal Errors than you can imagine! And when things went fine you had to worry about the MySQL server slowing your page down! I’ve seen queries take 3.5 seconds to complete. Do not use One.com if you plan on using software such as WordPress.

One.com Limitations

We need to understand that One.com is a very simple web host. This is no excuse for the lack of stability and poor uptime but it explains why you, as a customer, are limited. You have access to a web server with PHP and MySQL functionality, although you can’t configure the web server directives or the PHP settings. One.com gives you one MySQL-database and nothing more. You are unable to run asp.net applications and as far as I know SQLite is not supported.

Additional domains are not supported and you have limited domain control. If you want to transfer your domain to another registrar you have to talk to support and cancel your account. They rip you off when it comes to domain pricing, but for a single domain it’s not that big of a deal.

The mail servers won’t support the standard port for sending mail, and they refuse to use SSL (secure connection) for sending and receiving mail. Credit where it’s due – the catcher mail functionality is great. It’s not unique but it’s the only fancy thing you can enable over there.

There is no such thing as free traffic, and One.com knows that. You are, by agreement, unable to host large files on their servers. Not that this in itself is an issue but they also limit the size of a request to 3MB. This means that a site with a lot of images might get suspended. All it takes is one page, so make sure to check the size! Flash-games and such might easily doom you.

Is One.com worth using?

There is no right and wrong I suppose. One.com gives you something that “works” for most people, but then again most people don’t own a web site. If you have a blog for family and friends One.com could satisfy you, but beware of downtime and so on. The only reason to choose One.com is their pricing. If you plan on creating a larger site, go and purchase a better package from a better web host!

Bottom line: Do not use One.com as your web host unless you need a cheap host. Be aware of the stability issues and limitations.

Have you ever saved a file from the net to your desktop? Have you ever let that file stay there? Have this behavior cluttered your desktop?

Many users, me included, love saving files to the desktop. When we download something we want access to it NOW! Why navigate into a folder when we can find it right there, in front of us? The flip side is of course that one needs to clean the desktop.

Because of this issue – I hate cleaning – I created a little BAT-script that does this for me. Most of the files downloaded are temporary files such as cute and hilarious LoLCats or work/school instructions. They’re not worth organizing into my archive (my very big library of important files and things such as vacation photos), but if I delete them I’m sure I’ll need them again. If you throw a pen away you can bet you need one tomorrow.

The script takes the entire desktop folder and moves it into a desktop archive sorted by date. Very simple but very versatile. At the moment I have 50 folders and they occupy some 900Mb of disk space. I could at any time delete one or more folders to save space, but then again I have 800Gb free. I’m using the script to store useless files in case I ever need them again.

In order to save space, you should bring up your desktop archive folder and search for everything (enter * as the search term) and sort by size. Perhaps an install package of 2Gb was archived, so make sure to clean out any obvious disk waste. I usually delete any software and videos.

I’ve configured my script to run on every boot in Task Manager. Effectively the script cleans my desktop once or sometimes twice per day because I usually only boot once per day.

My iPhone 3GS is almost two years old now, and it doesn’t work as it’s supposed to. I get dropped reception to the network, and sometimes I get a “Accessory is not optimized for iPhone” when there is nothing plugged in…

My latest struggle was to update the firmware (iOS) via iTunes. First I had to download it three times because it “failed to download”, then I had to wait for ages while iTunes packed it up and prepped my iPhone for patching. After some twenty minutes of waiting I shut down iTunes, re-opened it and tried to patch again.

Could not establish a session to the iPhone.

Wait, what? Something went really, really wrong somewhere. I couldn’t update it via my pc (restart Windows – check!), nor could I update it via my iMac. There I was, wondering… until I thought of the brilliant idea to restart my iPhone!

Said and done, almost. It would go into a shut-down procedure, but it would display that spinning wheel and keep it going and going and going. After, again, twenty minutes I forced an iPhone shutdown (hold both buttons until it dies) and booted it up again.

It worked on the third time after the reboot. If your iPhone doesn’t work – try rebooting it. Hehe.

Everything said, I’m currently considering getting an iPhone 4. I believe Apple makes solid hardware and software, and given the nature of my 3GS I can hardly blame Apple for the problems I’ve had.

I wonder why beautiful things are left alone and forgotten. Why people abandon things they have worked so hard on, why they deserted them. Same goes for blogs, why would anyone simply let their blog die?

Since most blogs are hosted using automated system, they are not cleaned up afterwards. The hosting companies want to have material on their servers in order to generate traffic, and the cost of text is close to none – so they keep it as long as they can. If the users don’t chose to erase their work.. it stays online.

But why does a blog die? Is it because the writer is dead? Hehe, I hope so… or not. Well, sometimes I really hate the author since he or she might have been about to write something I need (like a tech walkthrough) but never got around to it. As far as I understand, the reasons for letting a blog die is as follows:

Not having time to blog.
Lost interest in blogging.
Created a new blog.
Lost login credentials.
Started going outside more.

Okay, I have to admit – I added the last one myself. It’s a joke… going outside have nothing with blogging to do, don’t worry! You can go outside and still write about silly cats on the internet, no problem! Seriously thought, why would anyone stop blogging?

Most dead blogs I’ve come across are deserted. It’s like walking into a house with plates of food still on the table. If you lost interest in expressing yourself on the internet, would you not have the courtesy to write a last post? Same goes for not having time – could you not write a last post about not having time? Or perhaps delete the blog.

Lost passwords and usernames can often be recovered, but in a worst-case scenario a new blog might be in order. Those people I can forgive for not posting a last post or such. But why would one create a new blog without reason? When I was younger I actually did this.. I blogged but I couldn’t stay in one place. I changed service four times before ending up with WordPress (and what is the ancient version of this blog!).

I think I deleted my previous blogs (one service actually shut down as well). The reason to why I switched was that I didn’t have enough control. After some three or four posts I had to move on because I couldn’t change text color or upload big images. It drove me mad, in a way. But could this really be why there are so many dead blogs? People should host their own blogs, so when they don’t want to blog, the blog will be taken offline.

I’ll die before this blog dies out. Stay tuned for some sixty years of blogging!